Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief by Rodney Stark
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

A Whiggish Sociology of Religion

What does it mean to say that one religion is better than another? Or that religion has evolved as a cultural artefact to assist in environmental adaptation? Rodney Stark thinks he knows the answers. But he does make a few presumptions that make his answers somewhat less than useless.

The first presumption is that he knows what constitutes successful cultural adaptation. For Stark success is measured in terms of longevity (and some other equally arbitrary metrics). The longer a religion persists, the better adapted it is to the conditions of the relevant culture. And for him, the apex of religious evolution is monotheism, just like the apex of physical evolution is Homo Sapiens. Isn’t that the obvious cultural destination to which several thousand years of recorded history (and genetic development) has led?

Well perhaps, if one excludes the religions of the East like Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and dozens of others which do not posses a divine figure at all. Or discount the tribal religions of Africa, North and South America, the Pacific, and the Arctic which persist still without the concept of a single all-powerful creator and may be longer lived than Christianity (and like the cockroach, will probably outlive Homo Sapiens). Stark eliminates these as irrelevant because they are not constituted by divine revelation but some kind of spiritual hearsay. That is, they do not claim that God has disclosed himself to their founders. The circularity as well as cultural arrogance of this reasoning is overwhelming.

The second presumption is that divine revelation, in addition to being necessary for true religion, is also able to evolve through human reason. This explains the development of monotheism (or its original dualistic forms) in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. His claim is that as the implications of monotheism have been worked out by theologians, it has become more coherent and intellectually compelling, as if religion were a scientific theory having certain rational characteristics.

Such ‘religious method’ is obviously bunk. To make such a claim, Stark must first of all ignore the contradictions of monotheistic religion acknowledged by its own adherents. The testimony of St. Paul that divine logic is simply inaccessible by human beings and the proclamation of Tertullian regarding Christian faith that “It is certain, because impossible” disprove Stark’s claim that there is a growing rationality to monotheism, or indeed rationality at all. And Reason, as St. Augustine insisted, is corrupt so cannot be trusted to reach sound conclusions, particularly when it comes to identifying or elaborating revelation. And this quite apart from the obviously varied, frequently contradictory, revelatory claims made historically by innumerable sects.*

Quite apart from his tendentious reading of both Scripture and history, Stark seems unaware of the only truly authentic Christian invention: faith. Thanks to the triumph of Pauline Christianity, faith, unconditional belief not ethical or ritual practice, has become a synonym for religion. And this is why Stark purposely makes the error of equating religion with revelation. It is only the ‘religions of the book,’ - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - which claim divine revelation. And it is only Christianity which defines its adherents solely as those attesting to its formal creeds (to be a Jew is a genetic fact; to be a Muslim is to submit to Allah and follow the other four behavioural ‘pillars’ of Islam).

Faith is the ultimate religious conquest by language. Faith is language worshipping itself in the most idolatrous manner possible. Stark’s pseudo-erudition is a paean to the power of language to distort and degrade what is not language. His is an academic’s religiosity proclaiming the best of all possible worlds because it is a world composed entirely of language which he uses to exert power.

Like scientists or philosophers who claim to know the criteria for ‘true science,’ Stark claims he knows the marks of true religion. His presentation of the history of religion progressing from a dark and terrible past to a glorious present is ludicrous, a wonderful example of Whig historiography. His final statement contradicts the entirety of the rest of his book: “I find it far more rational to regard the universe itself as the ultimate revelation of God.” So Stark is in direct communication with the Almighty. How enlightening. And he apparently wants to start his own religion. The world shudders in anticipation of further divine news.

* As an aside, the most important theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth, would be horrified at Stark’s claim that revelation is a linguistic phenomenon. For Barth, a very conservative evangelical Protestant, revelation is the “grabbing of one’s spirit by the throat.” As he put it, “God’s Word is not man’s word,” and even scripture is man’s word. Barth was aware, as Stark is not, of the terrible human consequences of burying religion in the credal tomb of language. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Learning To Not Understand

None of us understands all that we need to understand until after it’s too late to matter. In this remarkable memoir Sherry Turkle shows that she has understood a great deal. Some of it even before it was too late. As for the rest, she learned something even more important: “When I consider elementary school, I think that permission to not understand was its greatest gift.”

Ms Turkle and I are contemporaries (I’m her senior by 17 months). We also spent a part of our infancy together in Bayside, Queens (who knows but that our mothers may have bumped prams). And although our upbringing diverged, hers in Jewish Brooklyn mine 15 miles away in a Catholic enclave of Nassau County (the internal dynamics of the two groups were not dissimilar), we shared in the Spirit of the Times - the educational opportunities made available through prosperity; the hope for a less misogynist, racist, violent and unjust world; the idea of personal contribution through intellect; and an unconscious confidence in the institutions of religion, education, and government.

Our mothers shopped at the same stores (Mays and A&S mostly). They had the same worries about tight money and ailing relatives. But the greatest similarity was the “magical thinking,” in which difficulties could be resolved and the future assured simply by not talking about them. Such a condition is not a state of optimism in the face of adversity, but a denial that adversity exists at all. People died without warning because terminal illness didn’t fit in with family conversation. Men, in general, were volatile, unreliable creatures who exploited women. We “should know without words what was off limits.”

As Turkle says, “The expected is invisible.” We took all this for grated. This was how the world worked. But she and I were able to learn, however belatedly, how different the world outside our insulated cultural bubbles was. And we were both fortunate to learn not through overwhelming shock but through “slight and constructive dissociation from self.” In other words, the world was kind to us.

This made our parents look naive and even embarrassing at times. Why had they never prepared us for the ‘realities’ of life? There were different ways of thinking, of dressing, of behaving that we knew nothing about. There was a class structure in America, made all the more rigid in its denial as a matter of principle. There were incomprehensibly horrid people who committed atrocious acts while waving the Bible, the Constitution, or the latest issue of the National Observer.

Of course our parents didn’t tell us about such things because to know about them would have been corrupting. Better to suffer the shock of discovery than to be damaged through premature knowing. They protected us. But it seemed as if they had misled us. Family secrecy implies to a child that its family is the only one with secrets to hide. Intense religious education becomes a kind of secretive tribal pact rather than a spiritual event. Parental love is a burden. Some reject it, some succumb to its weight, but some, like Turkle, find another way: “My parents gave me burdens in childhood that I honed into gifts.”

And this is what she passes on to her students: “I say this to my students: You are at university to understand your gifts and what you love to do. If you are lucky, they will be the same thing. If not, let’s talk and see if we can increase the overlap.” This kind of wisdom is the product of dreams - dreams discarded as well as fulfilled, but mostly dreams demolished through their fulfilment. This is ultimately why the old cannot teach much to the young until the young have failed by achieving their dreams. “Stumbling and trying again,” not pursuing the same ambitions but changing them, is our real education.

As Turkle and I entered adulthood, the differences in the initial conditions of our lives became more pronounced. She attended Radcliffe College (the ‘sister college’ to Harvard before being merged into it progressively from 1977 to 1999). My university, also in New England, was somewhat less prestigious. She then went on, through academic brilliance, immense energy, and not a little luck, to become a leading figure in the psychology and sociology of technology. Among other things, she has pursued the study of “evocative objects” and “the lies we take for truth,” a not insignificant issue in social technology.

But even then I was on the fringes of her world when I joined a consulting firm in Boston. Once again our shadows may have crossed. In any case, I got to read her marvellous insights about technology as well as herself, and for that matter about myself. In a way our lives converged as we both developed an identity as bricoleur, a sort of professional crofting which takes bits and pieces from various fields and tries to put them together with some coherence. I think it is clear Turkle has achieved her objective: “You start with self-knowledge and then you generalize what you have learned to help others.” And sometimes this means not understanding at all. But that’s OK too.

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Why?: Explaining the Holocaust by Peter Hayes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Defective Gene Pool

Peter Hayes is very aware of the problem of ‘explaining’ the Holocaust. Right up front he points out the basic paradox:

“To say that one can explain the occurrence of the Holocaust seems tantamount to normalizing it, but professing that one cannot grasp it is an assertion of the speaker’s innocence—of his or her incapacity not only to conceive of such horror but to enact anything like it.”

In other words, to explain the murder of 6 million people requires finding a rational motive which then mitigates the massive evil involved. But to consider the event as a mute fact implies that inhumanity is simply beyond expression for ‘normal’ people.

Hayes presents his extremely sober and meticulous analysis of ‘Why?’ in a set of sub-issues. Within each issue his arguments are extremely well-documented and succinct. While there are elements of his own research, given the magnitude of his undertaking most of the material has been sourced from elsewhere. What is probably most original is his debunking of certain myths that have circulated from time to time in matters ranging from popular involvement in the programme of annihilation to the responses to that programme by non-Germans.

Hayes gives his own summary of conclusions for each issue at the end of the book. But here is my interpretation of his results issue by issue:

1. Why the Jews? Because it had become a tradition over millennia in Christian Europe to attribute any local or national misfortune to a Jewish presence.

2. Why the Germans? Because the particular economic and social conditions of Weimar Germany formed an opportunity for Hitler to take power.

3. Why murder? Because the Nazis were allowed to by the German populace through a carefully controlled programme of escalating violence against Jews and necessitated by the regime’s inability to expel Jews faster than it conquered them.

4. Why annihilation? Because by 1941 the Germans had nothing to lose either domestically or internationally, and the cost of the effort was insignificant.

5. Why wasn’t Jewish resistance more vigorous? Because their situation was manifestly hopeless and the Nazi strategy of annihilation was directed against whole communities which they manipulated expertly to minimise resistance.

6. Why did some Jews nevertheless survive? Because the Germans ran out of time in their latter conquests, allowing a quarter of European Jews to escape not through Gentile assistance but German defeat.

7. Why was immediate assistance to surviving victims, and longer term resettlement and restitution so difficult to obtain? Because it wasn’t considered in the interests of the victorious Western countries in the context of Cold War politics.

Certainly my summary interpretations cannot capture the extensive detail or nuance of Hayes’s exposition. And he does throw a number historical red herrings back in the sea. And, as a non-professional, I find his reasoning compelling.

Nevertheless, does the book really ‘explain’ the Holocaust? It makes it seem that all of the historical threads which created and sustained the massacre were merely a lack of good fortune, a perfect storm of human insanity and inhumanity. If one or more causal elements had been lacking, perhaps it needn’t have happened, at least with such massive ferocity.

Perhaps this is all any historian can do. But I don’t find it satisfying. The evil which was manifest in the Holocaust and so well presented by Hayes did not arise from the intersection of historical events and opportunities. The evil was there waiting, perhaps in Western culture, probably in religious institutions and the civil institutions derived from them, certainly in a very deep flaw in human psychology.

A superior explanation, therefore, it seems to me, is that human beings are simply not fit for purpose. It is not the case that there are merely some bad apples. The entire gene pool is maladapted to life on earth. As antisemitism and other irrational prejudices again resurface, apparently spontaneously, around the world, this conclusion presses itself forward as the only real explanation. There are, it seems, no normal people. Nor is there a solution to be found to our unfitness through finding reasons for such tragedy.

Perhaps I am simply ignorant.

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Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem by Heinrich Meier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Saving Politics

Most of us take for granted that the Enlightenment of the 18th century created a permanently liberal political culture in which unrestrained thought rather than religious tradition would define the values of society. But the success of political democracy, if success it be, did not resolve either the theoretical or the existential issue of philosophy (as the apotheosis of thought) and theology (as the justification for religious authority). Leo Strauss identified this issue almost exactly a century ago and presciently noted that “The fundamental alternative is that of the rule of philosophy over religion or the rule of religion over philosophy.”

I say presciently because isn’t this alternative being debated now within every major democracy in the world. While pundits like Fukuyama were declaring the End of History after the apparent triumph of democratic capitalism over the quasi-religious Communism of the Soviet Union, what Strauss called the Theologico-political problem simmered in the West, then boiled with talk of the failed ‘Enlightenment Project’, eventually blowing the lid off the stew pot of liberal democracy around the world with the election of decidedly anti-liberal leaders. The re-organised forces of religion are now pushing their theological norms in civil society on every continent.

Part of the reason for the resurrection of Theologico-politics according to Strauss is that religion is purported to be a way of life that philosophy is not. Religion gives certitude about what to believe and how to behave, or failing that, an authority from whom certitude may be achieved. Philosophy is not equipped to respond to such certainty. So it tends to ignore the claims of religion as obviously nonsensical or attempts to reconcile (or to obscure) the conflicts between doctrinal Faith and scientific Reason via shallow apologetics.

In addition, the Enlightenment effort to free politics and political thinking from the constraints of religious authority have now, paradoxically, created an ignorance and mistrust of the nature of politics. Meier summarises the progression concisely:

“What begins with the emancipation of politics from theology results ultimately, after the successful unleashing of a world of increasing purposive rationality and growing prosperity, in a state of incomprehension of and indifference towards the original sense of the theologico-political critique, a state in which the demands of politics are rejected with the same matter-of-factness as those of religion.”

Whether democratic politics have deteriorated, or their unsavouriness has simply become more visible, the widespread political disillusion and ennui is apparent. This is the opening, once again, for religion to reassert its claims amid the resulting turmoil.

Strauss’s philosophical programme neither ignores religion nor does it minimise the fundamental differences between philosophy and theology. Rather, as Heinrich Meier says, for Strauss, “there is no more powerful objection to the philosophical life imaginable than the objection that appeals to faith in the omnipotent God and to his commandment or law.” Religion, that is to say, the Judaeo-Christian religion (and by implication Islam) must be confronted squarely in its most fundamental claim: the idea of divine revelation.

The study of revelation as a religious topic is called Fundamental Theology. And the theologian who re-invented Fundamental Theology in the 20th century, Karl Barth, was a contemporary of Strauss. Both Barth and another contemporary, the political philosopher Carl Schmitt (who similarly reinvented political theology justifying the Nazi regime), essentially provoked Strauss’s response. As Strauss insisted,

“Only through the Bible is philosophy, or the quest for knowledge, challenged by knowledge, viz. by knowledge revealed by the omniscient God, or by knowledge identical with the self-communication of God. No alternative is more fundamental than the alternative: human guidance or divine guidance. Tertium non datur”[there is no third way].

But Strauss’s intention was not to create an alternative religion out of philosophy (this is in fact part of his criticism of modern philosophy). Rather he wants to use philosophy to create and maintain better politics. This is the justification for philosophy, not thought alone but a better way to live together. His critique of Spinoza is that his Ethica did not categorically establish this essentially moral superiority of philosophy over theology. Spinoza had left the possibility of revelation open. In that case, philosophy would be just as much a matter of faith as religion.

Part of Strauss’s answer to the religious challenge is to point out the personal paradox of faith. Faith creates humility before an infinitely external entity, say the theists. But Strauss contends that this is not humility at all but arrogant pride, specifically pride in the certainty of one’s formulaic faith (essentially faith in language). Faith’s mark of distinction is a prideful ignorance, a purposeful self-deception called revelation. Idolatry is inherent in revelation since its necessary formulation in doctrine prevents spiritual progress.

Strauss’s key insight is that religion, has always been a political activity, at least since the time of the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Eastern civilisations, including that of Israel. But the religions of revelation take politics in a new and dangerous direction. Essentially, revealed religion is smug, self-satisfied politics which cannot distinguish between truth and falsity because it has fixed the terms of debate and discussion. Revealed religion is simply bad politics. It creates relationships and behaviours which are inadequate for successful social existence.

I think that another way to express this Strauss’s idea is to note that the politics of revealed religion is based on a particular concept of power. In all three ‘religions of the book’, the One Sovereign Authority is the source of all power. Power is distributed to religious and secular leaders by divine will, and then further distributed through ecclesial and civil hierarchies. Religion based on revelation rather than variable myth, communal ritual, or evolving tradition is power politics. The fact that its presumptions justify not only the existing social establishment but also the hierarchical character of the very revelation at its core is an open secret. Even Karl Barth recognised this as a danger to religion itself.

That revealed religion is about power, not justice, love, peace, or human welfare in general is apparent at any level one cares to investigate the matter. Christianity, Islam, and even Judaism have always sought power, certainly over others, but in the first instance over their own members. As an empirical matter, this has always been the case. The Bible screams of the pursuit of power in every page of the Christian as well as Jewish components, as does the Quran. It is certainly debatable whether Moses, Jesus, or the Prophet were power-seekers. But what is incontrovertible is that those who wrote, transcribed, and promulgated their stories were just that.

The downside of religious power politics is that it is obdurately and intentionally blind as well as intolerant. It cannot learn, particularly about itself. The simple multiplicity of contradictory revealed ‘truths’ demonstrates the problem of fake news long before the internet. There is simply no way to “distinguish true faith from frivolous arbitrariness or obstinate self-deception, on the one hand, from mere opinion or simple conjecture, on the other hand, and finally and above all, from the diverse temptations of false belief.”

It is simply not in the political interests of religion to know of competing revelations. Indeed, in the Catholic Church it is a heresy to contend that we need to know anything other than that contained in biblical revelation and their official interpretations in order to either live a moral life or be redeemed at the end of it. The Church claims to be a societas perfecta (a claim more than remarkable in light of the continuing evidence of its institutionalised paedophilia). Most religious adherents, in any case, have no real understanding of the revelations that supposedly bind them together. Instinctively they recognise the essential political nature of their association.

Strauss saw that religion as unconditional belief could not be countered by a philosophy of unconditional belief (or for that matter unconditional unbelief). But such is the trap laid by religion, which claims that ultimately we must be committed to beliefs about the world that we cannot prove (including the rejection of beliefs). So why not a religious revelation rather than a philosophical presumption?

The difference of course is that philosophy has no unconditional beliefs, no firm presumptions. One of the principle activities of philosophy has been the identification of its own inadequate presumptions - in language, in mathematics, in the character of physical and mental reality. Whatever can be thought is potentially its field of operation. The only belief involved is that the field of inquiry is infinite, but even that belief is subject to revision. Philosophy is self-referentially coherent in a way revelation cannot be.

For Strauss this is not just an intellectual conclusion; it is a train of thought which implies a way of life. In this sense it is, not unlike the thought of Spinoza, Jewish in the best sense. Scripture and tradition as a source of questions not answers, the continuous never-ending search for search for truth, even the feeling of being ‘chosen’ and not quite settled are characteristics of the authentic humility of Spinoza’s as well as Strauss’s philosophy.

This is the opposite of the religious politics of power. Philosophy of the Straussian kind, in Jungian terms, is a politics of Eros rather than Logos. That is, it is a programme for evolving forms of direct human relatedness not a static state of intermediated being. Probity and security do not derive from something outside of humanity. They don’t even originate in philosophical thought, but only from the relations that permit philosophical thought.

This is what I take Strauss to mean by philosophy as a way of life. According to him, philosophy is about saving politics, that is, the relationships we need in order to thrive. The message is as urgent and timely as it was a century ago.

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Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Paul Babiak
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Inmates in Charge of the Asylum

Snakes in Suits describes what most of us already know about corporate organisations, namely that there are an awful lot of nasty people who can make life miserable. Many of these are clinically psychopathic. But knowing how to identify the psychopaths and documenting how many there are in managerial positions just isn’t possible. Nor would it make much difference if we could. What we have at the moment is merely a (unstable) description of a condition and its putative aetiology:

“Psychopathy is not solely a product of social and environmental forces. Genetic factors play an important role in the formation of the personality traits and temperament considered essential to the disorder. However, its lifelong expression is the result of complex interactions between biological/temperamental predispositions and social forces.

The authors provide a range of suggestions, mainly for the HR department, that they believe will help spot psychopaths before they are hired. But these suggestions are the result of anecdotal case studies and professional intuition alone and don’t amount to much in the corporate milieu. Despite the authors claims that progress has been since the first suggestion of the issue in 1941 (by Hare in fact), no practical results have been forthcoming.

The disease of corporate psychopathy is largely invisible except to the people who experience it directly. And it is likely to remain so for several reasons. In the first instance the so-called diagnostic criteria used to identify carriers are vague and unstable. As far as I am aware, for example, the three main diagnostic tests (PCL:R, PCL:SV, and PCL:YV) have not even been tested against each other, much less against non-criminal or other non-institutionalised populations.

Further, the ‘factors’ in each test are frequently overdetermined and could point to a number of conditions in the so-called Dark Triad of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism among many other disorders. So diagnosis is a linguistic game of ‘traits’. For example:

“The difference between psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder is that the former includes personality traits such as lack of empathy, grandiosity, and shallow emotions that are not necessary for a diagnosis of ASPD.”

From a purely epistemological viewpoint the classification of mental disorders therefore becomes meaningless except to clinicians. As a corporate employee, how would I distinguish empathy in a candidate? In any case, do I really care that the boss who is bullying the entire department is psychotic or merely anti-social?

Moreover spotting these traits outside of intensive psychiatric settings is simply impossible. Psychopaths are master impersonators who can outwit even experienced professionals much less typical HR managers.

And of course the self-referential problem of psychopathy in corporate organisations is inherently insurmountable. If the hypothesis that a substantial number of corporate executives are psychopathic, particularly at senior levels, is true, then who is likely to commission relevant research in the area? And even if useful criteria were developed, just imagine the potential legal liability.

Given the nature of the disease itself - hidden, manipulative, clever, remorseless - proving a diagnosis in court for the rejection of a candidate or the termination of an executive is a punt no intelligent CEO would take (presuming he or she wasn’t psychopathic!). According to some, psychopathic traits are just the ticket for improving corporate performance. What judge would dare step into the quagmire of such an arbitrary assessment of qualifications?

So I suppose we are all stuck with the casual torture of corporate existence. It’s just another one of life’s inadequacies to deal with. Psychopaths, like the poor, are always with us.

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The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages by Norman Cohn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Emperor of the Last Days

Norman Cohn describes a continuous line of religiously inspired revolutionaries from the author of the Book of Daniel in the 2nd century BCE to the apocalyptic cults of the 19th and 20th centuries. Arguably it was the Montanists of the mid-second century who held the first millennial revivals, even then calling for a return to the ‘original’ message of Jesus’s teaching. And it was they who established the paradigm for future Christian enthusiasts, a vision of a world ruled by demons, upon which God would imminently take revenge. They lived expectantly not, as the Jews for victory over their oppressive enemies, but for the destruction of the entire world - a kind of religious paranoia.

To describe this religious attitude as a psychosis may seem an exaggeration but it appears exactly that (how else to describe a hope for global annihilation?). These millennial cults arise most forcefully not in the midst of persecution but rather through some other general dislocation in society. As Cohn says, “again and again, in situations of mass disorientation and anxiety, traditional beliefs about a future golden age or messianic kingdom came to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities.” In other words, this kind of religious fervour is much more political than it is spiritual. The goal is always power and dominance over other groups, even (perhaps especially) those who share similar beliefs.

According to Cohn, such movements are always anti-establishment. But while Judaism tolerated a range of eccentric groups, the Christian Church did not, indeed, could not, since it was doctrine rather than genetics which held the institution together. So, “When in the fourth century Christianity attained a position of supremacy in the Mediterranean world and became the official religion of the Empire, ecclesiastical disapproval of millenarianism became emphatic.” But despite persistent attempts to suppress doctrinal deviation, such internal ecclesial strife “persisted in the obscure underworld of popular religion.”

Cohn identifies the primary constituents of these radical movements, namely “the unprivileged, the oppressed, the disoriented and the unbalanced.” In every case, it appears, the ‘have nots’, even while espousing the spiritual superiority of their relative disadvantage, seek to reverse their roles with those whom they criticise. In those instances in which their objectives are attained, they then maintain their attitude of superiority while accumulating the the means of power they formerly despised. Thus the continuing cycle of religious sociology through the Protestant Reformation and beyond.

It was the Christian appropriation of Jewish apocalyptic in the Book of Revelation and the derivative Sibylline prophecies of the Middle Ages which kept the fires of radical religion burning. These documents “deeply affected political attitudes. For medieval people the stupendous drama of the Last Days was not a phantasy about some remote and indefinite future but a prophecy which was infallible and which at almost any given moment was felt to be on the point of fulfilment.” The specific political situations that evoked these prophecies - the Roman Empire in the case of the New Testament and medieval social hierarchies in the case of latter prophecies - were forgotten, but the prophecies themselves retained their appeal and continue to motivate millennial and evangelical groups.

Perhaps the most important conclusion that can be drawn from Cohn’s work for the 21st century is the essential paradox of these movements. They start with popular discontent, attaching themselves to some expression of religious precept as an alternative to current norms. Very quickly they generate a leader who is invariably associated with the Messiah, either as his messenger or as the Last Emperor who will prepare the world for his arrival. But inevitably:

“In almost every new monarch his subjects tried to see that Last Emperor who was to preside over the Golden Age, while chroniclers bestowed on him the conventional messianic epithets, rex justus or maybe David. When each time experience brought the inevitable disillusionment people merely imagined the glorious consummation postponed to the next reign and, if they possibly could, regarded the reigning monarch as a ‘precursor’ with the mission of making the way straight for the Last Emperor.”

Am I simply prejudicial in suggesting Trump and his evangelical mob constitute the latest manifestation of the millennial fantasy?

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The Egg by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Leave ‘Em Wanting More

In order not to give the show away, I think I can only say that Weir has consolidated Leibniz and C.S. Peirce into a really interesting version of Mormon Gnosticism. A note inconsiderable feat in three pages.

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The Concept of Miracle by Richard Swinburne
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The Dirty Christian Secret

Richard Swinburne is a stalwart of Christian apologetics. His apparent aim over a long career is to convince the world that the Christian God is the only deity that makes and sense, and that the 17th century philosopher Leibniz was correct about this being the best of all possible worlds. He wrote The Concept of Miracle in 1970. Yet this week he is giving a lecture at my old Oxford College on related topics. In preparation for his talk, I took time to read this book again after many years. Swinburne, I discover, is not only long-lived, he is also consistent, still peddling the same ideas, largely to the already converted. I think his impact on the rest of us is minimal.

Swinburne defines a miracle as “the violation of a law of nature by a god.” This is in line with the thought of Thomas Aquinas and other important theologians who have considered the topic. But Swinburne takes it almost verbatim from Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, presumably to give it the appearance of enlightened secular modernity.

This definition in itself is revelatory. Like the religion from which it emanates, Christianity, it makes the standard of the miraculous the linguistic coherence of an event. If we can explain it, it’s not miraculous.

But any law of nature is necessarily a statement or formula about the world, in natural or scientific language. The only thing we know for certain about any such statement or formula is that it is unstable; it will change. A miracle therefore is that which doesn’t make sense to those who perceive it as such. So at any point in time, the best that can be said of the miraculous is that it is a tentative conclusion. Swinburne calls this issue a matter of different Weltanschauungen, or world-views and leaves the matter open as an epistemological issue of fact-finding.

But such a concept of miracle has more profound implications than the probability of its verification. The consequence of such a definition is that, by current theoretical standards, the world as we know it is a continuous infinite series of miracles. Quantum Theory very clearly makes no sense. Its verified claim of instantaneous action at a distance, for example, suffers from the same defect as Newton’s theory of gravity. And every prior natural theory had equivalent unexplainable phenomena. According to Swinburne, therefore, all of the phenomena which compromise these theories are miraculous.

And this consequence, of course, is a product of Christianity’s linguistic idolatry. As a dogmatic religion, Christianity is fundamentally dependent upon its interpretations of scriptures and its doctrinal pronouncements. That is, Christianity is a purely literary religion. Unlike Judaism, which is also a religion of the book, Christian creeds constitute the substance of redeeming faith. Behaviour is of secondary importance if it matters at all. And even behaviour is supposedly generated by faith through the confession of the correct words. Language has always been the Christian standard of membership and salvation.

In the same vein, Swinburne’s mention of ‘a god’ is a disingenuous linguistic ploy. The only god capable of altering natural laws is one which created natural laws. Such a god, as for example with various pagan gods, does not merely use its power within the bounds of natural law to ease human life or make it more miserable. This is a god that is not simply inconceivably powerful but one that essentially defines what power means. This is, in other words, the god of language. Or, less theologically, it is Language itself. This then is the Christian God - Language.

Swinburne spends the bulk of his essay dissecting the evidence for and against his Humean definition of miracle. The fact that he is doing nothing more than sharpening the linguistic tool of Christianity doesn’t bother him in the least. He probably doesn’t even notice what he’s up to. He is after all rationalising the irrationalities of faith by building up faith’s linguistic pedigree even more solidly than the Church has done over millennia.

In Christianity ethics is subsidiary to faith. What Swinburne does not even touch upon is the ethical aspect of miracles. In particular the theodicy of miracles, that is, God’s ethics in changing the laws of nature, doesn’t even get a mention. This is a subject universally avoided by philosophical theologians. The issue is this: if the world created by God is ‘good’ as biblically claimed, then why would it be necessary to alter natural laws? Does such alteration make the world an even better place? If so why not make such changes permanent, not just physical laws, but also the laws of human cognition and behavioural response?

The biblical tales of vengeful floods, fiery destruction, and the sending of a redeemer do suggest that the Christian God did take a somewhat experimental punt in the business of creation. Even with several iterations he has failed to get the hang of it. Meanwhile the magnitude of such intense suffering caused by his actions continues to increase daily. No, I’m afraid that if this Christian God exists, he is less than a benevolent, much less competent, entity. And the idea of miracles contains that dirty little secret within it.

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Telephone by Percival Everett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cleavage

Percival’s protagonist, Zach Wells, learns the truth behind the apparently contradictory meanings of the English verb ‘to cleave’ - both ‘to attach closely’ and ‘to separate forcefully’. After all, isn’t the world, from quantum physics to human affection, paradoxical?

“I considered that word, cleave, and wondered how it could contradict itself so cleanly, wondered if the two meanings canceled each other out, leaving nothing in its wake. Cleave.”

No one ever mentions that having children is a crap shoot, a bet with the universe using dice that are loaded in unknown ways. So we ignore the infinite possibilities for genetic mutations, recessive defects, or outright deformities and trundle on as if our power of procreation were divinely sanctioned, or at least a demonstration of some sort of control over life.

But even among the religiously minded, “The Lord giveth the and the Lord taketh away.” This shibboleth, of course, is the ultimate rationalisation for the random events of human existence, including existence itself. Even the most genetically perfect child poses enormous risks to personal mental health, parental relationships, and ultimately social well-being. The Markov chain of randomness defies reason. If God exists he is “An absentee landlord at best.”

Nevertheless an unreasoned and unreasonable fundamental optimism dominates our lives. As Zach Wells says at a particularly tragic moment. “everything now felt so hard, so real, every move an effort and a mystery, yet strangely, no move seemed as if it could be wrong.” Or could it merely be that any action didn’t make any difference in the situation. Every move had an unavoidable downside. If all tactics end in failure, can any be called ‘wrong’?

And the futility of intention and hope doesn’t just apply to children. What we think of as doing good has ramifications we can’t imagine. We listen civilly and it’s taken as incipient affection. We give constructive advice which results in personal harm. We teach and it encourages psychopaths to blossom. We marry and drive our partners into depression. And all that quite apart from the accidents and natural disasters which are accepted as normal. No surprise then that Percival uses an epigraph from Kierkegaard:

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations—one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.”

For everything, indeed, “transit lux, umbra permanet,” the light passes, the shadow remains. I too have lost a daughter before her death, in a manner similar to Zach Wells. Despite that, it is necessary to do good because God will punish us if we do good or not. Cleavage.

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Close Quarters by Larry Heinemann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Damn Fine Killers

It’s easy to get lost in Heinemann’s detailed descriptions of equipment, road maps, and soldierly recreations like dope, beer, and sex with the local prostitutes. Initially he provides explanations about the military terms, acronyms and patois that his protagonist Dozier/Deadeye/Flip deciphers as a raw replacement learning the trade. But gradually the explanations disappear as Dozier is absorbed into the culture of the American War in VietNam.

This attenuation of explanation is part of Heinemann’s technique. The narrative moves from description to confession. The transformation begins slowly. Dosier is a member of a group of modern dragoons, mounted soldiers who can dismount and fight as infantry. He drives an Armored Personnel Carrier, a vehicle only nominally designed for human transportation and certainly not for creaturely comfort. The driver suffers the worst in his cramped space as he steers the rattling hulk by pulling on brake handles. The blisters, cuts, and pain start in his finger tips and progressively moves throughout his entire body.

And with the physical changes produced by the job, the spiritual changes occur apace. The mixture of an alien culture, constant threat, drugs, the sudden death of comrades, and the procedural insanity of military life, re-shapes Dosier’s psyche. He documents the increments of what is essentially his re-programming in increasingly long paragraphs of existential vomit. As his body becomes accustomed to the vehicle, his soul becomes oriented to the job, which is simply survival.

The turning point is subtly signalled when Dosier takes leave of his homeward bound mentor, Cross. Cross gives Dosier his unofficial, unauthorised pump shotgun in exchange for Dosier’s standard M16. The shotgun is a far more primitive weapon than the automatic rifle. And that’s the point. Dosier has lost the habits of civilised life. He has become a journeyman of war. The shotgun doesn’t kill as effectively as an M16 but it maims in a much more satisfying way. It’s victim suffers a great deal more before it dies. Receipt of the gun is a sign of his descent into savagery.

Dosier has learned how to hate. He hates the enemy of course. But he also hates the country of VietNam and all of its people, even the children. They’re all gooks, potential killers. He hates the housecats, the admin soldiers who never go outside the wire, have a cushy life, and make his a misery. He hates lifers, that os, career enlisted men as well as officers. He hates his black colleagues because the other white boys do. He hates the Army as an institution for putting him in a situation he can’t comprehend. By extension he hates the government that initiated the violent mess and the country that tolerates its continuation. Hate is his fuel. He runs on it. It keeps him alive. It helps to dim the horror of the “collage of death poses” after a big shoot out.

There is a cost however - Dosier has also learned to hate himself. He is largely unaware of his hate and the ghastliness of the dreams and fantasies it generates. He only sees it clearly in his comrades. Hatred is banal, squalid, and ugly, as well as casually violent. It constitutes a sort of self-immolation. This is what it takes to make what the general calls “damn fine killers.”

Then the killers go home.

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The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Solipsistic Gap

[There is a terminological issue in this book’s title that might be disciplinary in origin. The author is a clinical psychologist and considers sociopathy the equivalent to ‘anti-social personality disorder’ as per the definition in the the manual of the American Psychiatric Association. But sociopathy is not a diagnostic category for mental disease in that manual, while psychopathy is. So with due deference to the author’s professionalism, I have chosen to use the term psychopath rather than sociopath in my comments. The modifier ‘narcissistic’ seems redundant in use with either term since it is implied by both. I don’t think my change in terminology significantly affects the authors conclusions... or mine. But apologies to her for any resulting infelicities]

Psychopaths are living solipsisms. Not in the sense that they don’t believe other minds exist - they are acutely aware they do exist, if only as inferior to their own. They are solipsistic because the rest of us believe that psychopaths have minds similar to our own. They don’t. They wear the “Mask of Sanity” which hides a significant absence of human wetware. Specifically, they lack conscience, that component of mind/spirit/humanness which limits the pursuit of one’s own will.

The non-psychopath cannot really conceive of the existence of this mental state. It is almost beyond comprehension to allow the idea of a flesh and blood robot to exist outside of science fiction or horror fantasy. The existence of such an actual entity brings into question the very definition of the category ‘human’. And indeed, there is a species-like gap between psychopaths and the mere neurotics of the world. And psychopaths know how to exploit that gap for fun and profit.

As Martha Stout points out, “your very mind is not the same as theirs.” And psychopaths are right, their. minds are in fact superior in a very specific, if unfortunate, way. They experience no guilt, remorse, regret, or responsibility. But because they look like other human beings, they pass unnoticed. As Stout explains “Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.”

Consequently psychopaths are the natural winners in evolutionary competition. They have a “huge and secret advantage, [coupled] with the corresponding handicap of other people.” So just as wealth tends to attract more wealth, psychopaths attract (and indeed create) other psychopaths in their quest for domination at every level of society. In short, the amorality of psychopathology ‘works’ quite well for the afflicted individual.

But unfortunately “Such people are insane, dangerously so,” as Stout says. What she has found through her own practise is that when it comes to other people, “the damage caused by the sociopaths among us is deep and lasting, often tragically lethal, and startlingly common.” It seems likely that only a few of the most unfortunate psychopaths ever get nicked. Even so they may constitute up to a quarter of the prison population.

And unlike your average neurotic who might be helped by drugs or psychotherapy, the psychopath has a “noncorrectable disfigurement of character” They might consume an endless supply of pharmacological and psychiatric resources, but they will remain unchanged. They have no mind to repair. In fact they will attempt to exploit the professional attention directed toward them in the same way that they attempt to exploit the rest of the population.

Psychopaths are what Scott Peck almost forty years ago called the “People of the Lie”. Both his book and Stout’s consist mainly of case studies about the same phenomena. Peck found psychopathology comparatively rarely in his psychiatric practice. But either because he was lucky or because the world has changed for the worse, that rarity is no more. Psychopaths are everywhere. Literally. Stout quotes studies unavailable in Peck’s era which estimate that psychopaths constitute 4% of the population (other research, however, shows two or three times that level). Psychopaths are also multi-talented:

“What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron—or what makes the difference between an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer—is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.”

The details of Stout’s case studies are frightening and commensurately varied. Obviously they are evidence of an important public health issue. But psychopaths also constitute a philosophical and moral issue which I have tried to summarise in the title to this piece. They are not just qualitatively different, they are truly alien. How should any society deal with those who are constitutionally committed to destroying as much as they can within it? There is no way to close the solipsistic gap. Can this gap somehow be institutionally recognised? If so, it would go a long way toward improving live on earth.

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The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

In Praise of Evil

I can imagine a conversation with the author, Kevin Dutton, in the recovery ward after my last surgery: “Did you know that the cool, calculating, calm-under-pressure neurosurgeon who just did your spinal de-compression is a psychopath? Best in the business actually. You’re lucky you snagged him. Most of the medical psychopaths have moved to America” So now I know - psychopaths just have to find their appropriate role in society.

That in brief is Kevin Dutton’s argument. We ought to recognise that psychopaths, those folk characterised by an extreme “grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, and the manipulation of others,” have been stigmatised by their association with serial killers, sexual abusers, and other violent criminals. Psychopaths, he claims, can also play a productive role in society if we give them a chance.

Dutton employs some curious reasoning to get to this conclusion. For example, he writes that these same psychopathological traits: “… are also shared by politicians and world leaders: individuals running not from the police, but for office,“ as if achieving positions of power and influence demonstrates that psychopathology is a positive genetic adaptation to modern life. Leaders without conscience are simply not problematic for Dutton. Shame and feelings of personal responsibility have no place in his leadership-world.

Dutton then goes on to immediately cite a leading researcher in the field of mental disorders as if confirming his opinion about benign psychopathy. “Such a [psychopathic] profile,… allows those who present with it to do what they like when they like, completely unfazed by the social, moral, or legal consequences of their actions.” This Dutton believes is situationally virtuous, that it is the kind of ruthless, focussed, remorseless service we expect from people in charge - especially the robocop police and the best politicians money can buy!

The underlying assumption from which Dutton elaborates his view is that we’re all psychopaths to some degree, and further that this is a good thing. As he says, “… there’s evidence to suggest that psychopathy, in small doses at least, is personality with a tan—and that it can have surprising benefits.” I have no experience of a tanned personality, but I take him to me that such a thing has some aesthetic attractiveness.

And in this aesthetic evaluation of psychopathy Dutton is correct. I accept his judgement at face value. They lie well, and can charm the most wary of victims:

“If there’s one thing that psychopaths have in common, it’s the consummate ability to pass themselves off as normal everyday folk, while behind the facade—the brutal, brilliant disguise—beats the refrigerated heart of a ruthless, glacial predator.”

And this is what we all possess? Deep down we are all ice-cold predators? Hardly. Even the most pessimistic Gnostic never made such a claim. Even Augustine and Calvin left some wiggle room. Dutton is projecting a personal fantasy. The diagnosis of psychopathology is a defined medical condition. It’s not a spectrum. The neuroses prevalent in the population as a whole do not constitute pathological symptoms, tendencies toward psychotic breaks, or predictors of future violence. There is arguably a spectrum of mental health. But to claim that we all share the psychopath’s condition is absurd.

Dutton’s intention is clear. He wants us to empathise with the psychopath. Do they not bleed? Dutton provides everything from a mythical history of human evolution (predatory violence put food on the table) to descriptions of a wide variety of jobs in current society which can be filled by psychopaths (CEO, astronaut, entrepreneur, bomb disposal experts etc.). We need to promote a caring/sharing attitude towards these people who are wrongly categorised as a social menace. They should be welcomed not subjected to discrimination.

This to me is some king of faux tolerance gone mad. Psychopaths are domestic terrorists. Not all are violent criminals but a significant number are. And those who are not violent nevertheless destroy the lives of those over whom they have control. They start families, seek leadership roles, and run for public office precisely in order to dominate. From those positions they are able to inflict psychological and physical damage on whole populations. Having admitted that they succeed so well, Dutton still can’t understand that this is a social problem. As far as he’s concerned, the inmates are the most capable folk around to run the asylum.

Dutton portrays psychopathology as a sort of malevolent skill that we should recognise as such. But he also says that “…by being a psychopath, you in fact have an advantage over other people.” This sounds like a rallying call for the successful but still scorned psychopaths among us, not unlike the various pedophile groups which promote an ‘understanding’ of the naturalness of adult attraction to children. Dutton’s offers an equally creepy message.

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Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry by Owen Barfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An Aesthetic Epistemology

What a wonderfully insightful, erudite and concise example of reasoning! It almost doesn’t matter weather Barfield is correct or not because the sheer elegant beauty of his thinking is so enticing. That he is correct, however, is a good bet, a bit like discovering Plato is a pseudonym for Helen of Troy and she’s asked you out on a date.

Barfield starts with the apparently innocuous example of a rainbow. Obviously the rainbow doesn’t exist except when it is seen. The particles of water which physically exist in the air-space of a thunderstorm are not the rainbow. The rainbow is constituted by that phenomenon and the human eye and brain in concert. This is ‘Kant for dummies’, and very effective.

Then extend that observation of the rainbow to the entirety of creation. None of it exists unless it is perceived, or as Barfield terms it, becomes a representation in the human senses. That’s right, the tree falling in the forest doesn’t make a sound if there’s no one to hear it. Even more surprising, “there is no solidity if there is nothing to feel it.” This talent to make representations, shared with many other creatures, Barfield calls “figuration.” Think of this as a confirmation of the modern corporate management principle: if it don’t get noticed it don’t exist.

A little clarification might help ease the threat of solipsism. A representation is something I perceive to be there. The same goes for you and everyone else. If my representation is different from that of others, this calls for an explanation. If a satisfactory explanation is found (e.g. differences in distance or persecutive on a phenomenon) then my representation ends by being part of a collective representation. If an explanation cannot be found, we’re stuck with social tension.

But it is also crucial to recognise that all the collective representations taken together with whatever personal representations we each may have don’t reduce what is unrepresented. We can say that the unrepresented is what is independently there and is undiminished in its infinity when anything becomes represented. In that case the world that we all accept as real is in fact a system of collective representations but it cannot be anything approaching the reality of what is there, or the phenomena that take place. This is so partly because of human sensory and technological limitations. But it is also a consequence that we are constantly choosing what to notice (to perceive) depending on what interests us.

What we then do with representations is remarkable and probably unique in the world as far as we know. We use language to name the representations and so develop words, ideas, concepts. This Barfield calls “beta-thinking” which is characterised by an intimate “participation” with the phenomenon we are engaged with.

Participation has a very specific meaning for Barfield beyond mere involvement. It is the “extra-sensory relation of the human being and the phenomenon.” In other words, beta-thinking uses language. The existence of the phenomenon depends fundamentally on this participation, that is, providing words for what we perceive. This provides the necessary condition for the creation of collective representations as well as subsequent cultures. Different words, different phenomena.

Our species has yet another unique skill. We can think about representations as something independent of ourselves and then consider representations in their relations with each other, a kind of analysis or theorising. And we can think about the nature of collective representations as such, and their relation to our own minds. This is a special kind of reflective ability which considers language independent of its figurative uses. Barfield calls this “alpha-thinking.” Alpha-thinking is akin to what can be called rational or scientific reasoning.

The three modes of thought interact more or less continuously, acting as what would be called (much later) cybernetic regulators on each other. But there seems to have been an evolution of this interaction within recorded history. Alpha-thinking has grown much more important. This can be documented in a number of interesting ways.

For example, when we translate the Greek ‘nous‘(νους) as ‘mind’ and ‘logos‘ (λογος) as ‘reason’ or ‘word’, “we are in continuous danger of substituting our phenomena for theirs,” among other reasons because the Greeks had simply not developed alpha-thinking as we have. They participated in phenomena they describe such that the significance of the ancient Greek really can’t be recaptured. Their divine pantheon to us presents many problem of logic that simply never occurred to them. Their ideas of personal virtue were not ethical abstractions but practical demonstrations by epic heroes.

Perhaps the most compelling proof of the shift toward alpha-thinking is the so-called Copernican revolution, which also involved Kepler and Galileo. The ancient Greek notion of ‘hypothesis’ is that it is an explanation which “saves the appearances,” not in the sense of avoiding embarrassment but because such an explanation would account for the facts at hand acquired by beta-thinking. The Greeks weren’t bothered at all if several hypotheses accomplished this objective, even if they were contrary to each other. Respect for the factual data not theory was paramount.

Thus the idea of a heliocentric universe had been mooted and commonly known as early as the sixth century in a commentary on Aristotle’s treatise on astronomy (De Caelo). The real turning point in science occurred when Kepler and Galileo, and Copernicus “began to think not just that the heliocentric hypothesis saved the appearances but was physically true, in fact an ultimate truth.” This constitutes the real Medieval scientific revolution, not merely a change in paradigm but a fundamental shift in the nature of thought itself. Hence the Church could allow Galileo to continue to teach Copernicanism as an hypothesis that saved the appearances, but not as a truth.

What was feared by the Church in its condemnation of Galileo was a new theory of theory, namely that if some theory saved all the appearances, it was identical with truth. In other words, that if such a theory became a collective representation and used in alpha-thinking, it would be taken for more than an “artificial as if” Such an assertion would quite rightly be considered an idolatrous statement (the Church, of course, failed to comprehend that its great doctrinal edifice was exactly that for the same reason; Barfield misses the point as well, so forgive him his last two chapters).

So, concludes Barfield, “A representation which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate ought not to be considered a representation. It is an idol.” Through this insight we are able to detect what is essentially the evolution of idols from around the point of the Copernican revolution - a succession of claims to the ultimate truth of successive collective representations, all ultimately overthrown and forgotten as false idols. But yet each subsequentLy ‘confirmed’ hypothesis claiming to be true.

This continuous quasi-revolution in thought occurs in part because of the nature of language itself which means something slightly different today than it did yesterday; but also because alpha-thinking is inherently dialectical. It inevitably seeks the flaws in itself through the process of turning personal into collective representations. Indeed, that appears what we mean by inquiry tout court. And yet many scientists, religionists, ideologues as well as many other purely obnoxious people continue to insist that they know the truth. This is not only idolatry, it is hubris of the most intense order. And the insistence on ultimate truth is the best criterion of likely falsity I have ever come across in a lifetime of searching.

Postscript: Barfield’s theory is, as far as I can tell, exactly the same as the semiotic theory put forth by C. S. Peirce a half century earlier. Barfield’s ‘representation’ is functionally equivalent to Peirce’s ‘sign’. And the modes of thought, that is, figuration, alpha and beta-thinking, track Peirce’s First, Second, and Third. Barfield doesn’t mention Peirce so I presume that he knew nothing of his work or the work of other American pragmatists.

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Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jew-Whispering

Fortunately the days of Swastikas on storefronts and Jew-baiting at cocktail parties are mostly past. Or at least only a few obviously mad people would defend the doers. But that doesn’t mean that Jews have been liberated from a sort of anti-Semitic Jim Crow intended to keep them in their place. This is what David Baddiel’s (according to him, the best known person in Britain for being Jewish) book is about - the spruced-up, toned-down, but unmissable hatred of Jews. Once you become aware of it, you can’t miss it.

The new anti-Semite is a kinder and gentler racist than his forbears. He knows that berating the Jew, much less kicking him, is generally counterproductive to the cause, which, of course, is to create a feeling of superiority. Catcalls of ‘Christ killer’ or overt hostility might provoke a public reaction that looks bad and feels bad. So the anti-Semite has developed a new strategy: ignore the Jew. Just don’t acknowledge him at all. Act as if anti-Semitic racism just doesn’t exist, and really never has.

This new approach has real functional merit. Jews get the message, so the anti-Semite gets his buzz. And unlike traditional methods, there’s nothing overt to criticise. Obviously any complaints, for example by a Jew like Baddiel, are a consequence of over-sensitivity (and of course Jewish paranoia). The proof lies only in the negative differences in the attention paid to others not in positive action. These differences are what Baddiel slowly and softly reveals, the undercurrent of hatred of which only the victim is aware.

It’s a kind of horse-whispering really. Like the modern cowboy, the modern anti-Semite knows that Jews are intelligent, social creatures. Getting such animals to conform requires subtlety and lightness of touch. Body language not harangues establish dominance. Slight but decisive nudges are then all that is necessary to remind the animal of whose in charge. Once a horse is under saddle it has essentially lost its identity as a horse and, and accepts and is accepted in its servile position among human beings.

The successful Jew-whisperer is then able to minimise the importance of the growing number of overt acts - the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, the harassment of Jewish neighbourhoods, and indeed the killing of Jews in their synagogues. The anti-Semite can claim these are isolated incidents that involve religion not race (this inverting the causality used by the Catholic Church to distance itself from its anti-Semitic pedigree).

Baddiel provides dozens of factual examples to make his point. These are necessarily anecdotal. One in particular I find irresistible. I think it appropriate to end my remarks with it:

“… in July 2020, following the general questioning around race and ethnicity provoked by BLM, the Archbishop of York, the Right Reverend Stephen Cottrell said, in the Sunday Times, ‘Jesus was a black man’.

If you don’t think that comment profoundly offensive, you’ve made Baddiel’s point for him. Jew-whisperers are everywhere.

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The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement by Jean M. Twenge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Apocalypse Has Arrived

We’re already cooked. Really. Forget about the omicron virus, global warming, the big tech threat to freedom, AI inflexion points, Russians in the Ukraine, and Republican insanity. All these have a common core which so dominates our world that it is impossible to inhibit much less reverse its effects: pathological narcissism. Because “Narcissism is a psychocultural affliction,” it is really untreatable by any known therapy, remedy, or social campaign.

According to Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, we are now enthralled by a global culture of narcissism. As with any culture the culture of narcissism has an overdetermined history. It is the product of a vague coincidence of factors including war, economic fluctuations, influential sociological and psychological theories, technological advance, and… well plain serendipity.

The symptoms of this narcissistic culture are everywhere in plain sight. Near universal degeneration of national and local communities, the aspirations of youth and the disappointments of the elderly, the sexualisation of infancy and the disillusion of adolescents, disparaging attitudes towards racial difference, relative disadvantage, poverty, and disability, personal economic irresponsibility and institutional promotion of this irresponsibility.

Celebrity, ostentation, self-absorption and other manifestations of adolescence are now extended through whole populations. The authors conclude that “Narcissism has spread through the generations like a particularly pernicious virus—one with multiple means of entry and transmission.” Narcissism appears as if it’s a necessary condition to get on in the world: “Despite the iffy performance record of narcissists in leadership roles, narcissists are more likely than others to emerge as leaders in an organization.”

The analytic and anecdotal data supports these conclusions:

“Many cultural changes were eminently quantifiable: the fivefold increase in plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures in just ten years, the growth of celebrity gossip magazines, Americans spending more than they earn and racking up huge amounts of debt, the growing size of houses, the increasing popularity of giving children unique names, polling data on the importance of being rich and famous, and the growing number of people who cheat… the number of teens getting breast augmentations jumped 55% in just one year from 2006 to 2007, and some parents do indeed pay for them as graduation gifts”

So if you’ve felt like a frog in a slowly heating pan of water, you’re not hallucinating. Things are changing, and pretty quickly. But not just in the superficial ways revealed in the popular media (or for that matter in the fringe like QAnon who can’t see the implicit conspiracy of which they are a part). Narcissism is proliferating and evolving faster than the COVID virus: “Not only are there more narcissists than ever, but non-narcissistic people are seduced by the increasing emphasis on material wealth, physical appearance, celebrity worship, and attention seeking.”

According to fairly reliable surveys in the first decade of the 21st century (The Narcissism Epidemic was published in 2009), 1 in 4 college students showed markedly narcissistic traits; and almost half of those appeared to be suffering from clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). And this is the tip of a sociological iceberg because “lurking underneath is the narcissistic culture that has drawn in many more. The narcissism epidemic has spread to the culture as a whole, affecting both narcissistic and less self-centered people.”

The authors pinpoint the ‘patient zero’ of this now worldwide malaise in the United States as the clearly dominant cultural influencer of the late 20th century. Partly this is due to the subtle shift in values: “in America today there are few values more fiercely held than the importance of self-admiration.” Americans, they say, “love to love themselves.” But in a typically narcissistic manner, this national self-admiration seems to increase in direct proportion to the country’s obvious decline in its confidence in its own institutions of government, law, and religion. The authors quip that “Narcissism is the fast food of the soul.” It is easy to get and immediately enjoyable. But it is also destructive of health. Americans, it seems, have become obese in more than physical terms.

Of note in this regard is that, although five years before his political bid, Donald Trump is put forward as a sort of poster boy for the new American self image and aspirational ikon:

Donald Trump, who puts his name on everything he builds, has his own TV show, named a university after himself (yes, there is a Trump University), and picks fights with talk show hosts, is a great example of someone who is both successful and appears to be narcissistic. We know about Donald Trump’s success because he is relentlessly self-promoting. It is hard to miss The Donald in the media, and he is rich—but there are other real estate tycoons you’ve never heard of because they are not self-promoters and don’t want to be in the limelight.”

I think it is unlikely that even the authors would have predicted such a massive cultural shift that would permit the man to be nominated and elected to the presidency only five years later. It is difficult to imagine a better confirmation of their thesis than these events. They got it exactly right: “Americans are obsessed with people who are obsessed with themselves.” Trump is the perfect combination of vacuous celebrity, inflated ego, and ruthless determination to dominate that are the hallmarks of the pathological narcissist. He is indeed “the number one for thinking he is the number one,” and has brought a lot section of the population to the same conclusion.

It is clearly impossible to accurately predict the evolutionary path of a culture. We know more about black holes and the behaviour of quantum particles than we do about our effects on each other. But it is certain that the “quest for the self” which has characterised so much of recent cultural history cannot end well. Even the political, economic, and social crisis it is causing now simply provides more material, more ‘supply’ or ‘fuel’ for narcissism to feed off.

One way to encapsulate the effects of what is essentially a global revolution is to recognise the profound change in ethics this revolution has produced. Everyone of the world’s major religions and secular thinkers about morality agree on the supreme importance of the Golden Rule. Doing unto others at least to the degree you would have them do unto you is the root of civilisation. Narcissists dedicate themselves to breaking this rule, and do so by exploiting those who abide by it. So their attack on civilisation is profound and apparently successful.

This very well could be the way the world ends, not with a bomb but with a narcissistic whine.

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Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited by Sam Vaknin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Present Without Conviction

According to Sam Vaknin, Narcissism is sort of PTSD resulting from either an extreme overvaluation or undervaluation of a person in infancy. It is an habitual adaptation that defends against the fear of emotional and physical abandonment by the parents, especially the mother. The most self-destructive and socially manifest form of Narcissism is Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) which is defined officially by the AMA as a mental disease. Vaknin interprets the official jargon thus: ”Pathological narcissism is a lifelong pattern of traits and behaviours which signify infatuation and obsession with one’s self to the exclusion of all others and the egotistic and ruthless pursuit of one’s gratification, dominance, and ambition.”

Malignant Self-Love is an ill-written and badly edited book (the editor is apparently the author’s wife and the book is self-published). It resembles notes in preparation for a doctoral thesis in abnormal psychology (and certainly would not be allowed to be submitted to much less approved by a review committee). The book’s main sections contain analytical extracts from professional bodies, and a curious phenomenology of the condition organised under ‘100 Frequently Asked Questions’. Many of these questions are not actually answered and the answers given are often repetitive. There are no footnotes and very few internal citations in the answers to these questions. The source of the questions themselves is unstated.

Despite its flaws, however, Malignant Self-Love is not without value. Narcissism, not COVID, is likely to be the dominant human disease of the future. The fact that it originates and proliferates in social relationships rather than viral vectors makes it harder to track and trace but easier to spread through social technology. It is also a condition which has many more variants than even widespread viral infections.

Pathological narcissism was first described in detail by Freud in his essay “On Narcissism” in 1914. Apparently he considered the condition relatively rare. NPD was not fully defined and described until the late 1980’s. But since then it is clear that the condition is (or has become, the tense makes little difference) far more prevalent than previously realised, possibly because of its symptomatic variability and and diverse aetiology.

Each case of Narcissism could indeed be a unique manifestation of the condition, reflecting the individual circumstances which produced it. Although no epidemiological data is available today, it is likely that the disease may ultimately be more deadly than COVID, and certainly causes at least as much human misery. NPD is also incurable by any known pharmacological or other psychiatric regime.

The symptoms of the disease are becoming increasingly well known thanks to Donald Trump who has demonstrated them all publicly on a global platform for the last six years or so. As the Harvey Weinstein of Narcissism, his casual mendacity, persistent self-glorification, unashamed grandiosity, insatiable need for attention, vengefulness, and dearth of stable relationships are exposed continuously. He constitutes a sort of encyclopaedia of shared knowledge about the disease.

Trump lives off the “Narcissistic Supply” provided by his followers. He has no commitment to their political or personal issues except that through them their source as his narcissistic ‘fuel’ will be maintained. Trump is politically, intellectually, and emotionally vacuous and relies on these followers to affirm the self-image he projects to them. He needs them not primarily for electoral or commercial position but for maintaining his own identity. As Vaknin puts it rather well, Trump is “present without conviction.”

And as Vaknin also points out, “Narcissists tend to breed narcissists and perpetuate their condition.” Such breeding need not be genetic. The spreading of the disease socially is far more effective: “Some narcissists are covert, or Inverted Narcissists. As codependents, they derive their Narcissistic Supply from their relationships with classic narcissists.” Trump’s supporters are not unaware of his disorder. On the contrary, they admire it and get satisfaction from it. The level of support he receives from these people is an indication of the incidence of the disease as well as its persistence in the general population.

So while Malignant Self-Love is not a good book, it is a necessary book. It lacks the authority of a professional mental health worker and the focus of a journalist. It nevertheless exposes what may well be the real human crisis of the next century.

Postscript: Sam Vaknin is a former securities trader who was convicted of securities fraud in Israel for which he spent some years in the pokey. He is also a self-confessed Narcissist who speaks with the authority of personal experience. At several points in the text he confesses to using his own understanding of narcissism to scam similarly narcissistic investors. Who knows, the current narcissistic coalition around Trump may one day wake up to the scam they are in…. Then again…. Nah

Postscript 07/02/22: another GR reader sent me this which documents the Trumpian disordered mind: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...

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Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Monsters Are Not People

Notes on an Execution gives an important perspective on predatory males, in this case a serial killer who is obviously a psychopath. I would like to give a response which is much less forgiving about her protagonist. For me psychopaths originate in another universe. They look and talk like other people, but they are aliens. They are existentially of a different order. So I ask an impertinent question provoked by the book: Are psychopaths human? Seriously, should we tolerate people who, because of nature or nurture, are inherently dangerous to the rest of us either as a matter of law or even mere civility?

In her quietly provocative novel, Danya Kukafka brings this issue up in a suitably subtle way. She quotes St. Augustine through her character of the policewoman Saffy, who knows the psychopathic Ansel both as a child and through her investigation. According to Saffy, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit evil to exist at all.” Saffy doesn’t say this aloud but she thinks it with clear irony as the result of her religious education.

The legal “presumption of innocent until proven guilty” is at root religious and stems from this element of Christian doctrine. The prison chaplain expresses this doctrine explicitly to the condemned Ansel: “Of course you can be good, the chaplain says. Everyone can be good.” This is not just an error, it’s a tragedy

This confident presumption of benign potential is a precept that could only be made in a society which has decided that the world is inherently good. This is a society which presumes that evil is a relatively rare aberration, and that where evil does exist it does so not as a force but as an absence of the virtue which had been, as it were, baked into the universe when it was created by God. Evil is, accordingly, a deficiency of the saving grace of God.

At least this is the theory put forward by St. Augustine in his attempt to counter the arguments by his Gnostic opponents. For them the prevalence of evil in the world is obvious and implies that creation is simply an unfortunate mistake. For Augustine, evil was a dearth of God rather than a glut of some malign substance. For him it wasn’t problematic that God appeared to dole out remarkably little grace.

The flaw in Augustine is obvious to all but medieval theologians and their liberal descendants. If evil is the absence of good, then all of creation is at least somewhat evil because it doesn’t possess the perfection of good that is God. Evil then is the baseline of existence. Ansel admits as much, quoting Sartre: “No one thing can be wholly good, can it?” Adam and Eve didn’t invent evil, it was there waiting all the time in the ground they walked on, a moral inadequacy which could never be corrected. Not only that. God in his perfection knew this to be the case, that what he had created would fail because it wasn’t him. Could such a divinity really be called ‘good’?

Clearly there is a spectrum of human evil, even in Augustine’s terms. But at what point does a quantitative absence of good make a qualitative change in biological existence. We implicitly recognise that some such quantitative genetic change in the past has resulted in the qualitative emergence of the genus Homo about two million years ago. Anyone not descended from that biological line is simply not human by definition, and is treated as an animal - with some rights surely, but not human rights. An animal’s legal status is simply but decisively different. The psychopath is not just another bad person.

There is evidence that psychopathy is the consequence of genetics. There is other evidence that such genetic predisposition is ‘activated’ by traumatic up-bringing. It may even be the case that horrible childhood experience is enough to establish psychopathic behaviour in otherwise ‘normal’ individuals. But according to our traditions, psychopathic behaviour, even when it is observed and documented, is tolerated until it becomes illegal, that is until some other person is injured or murdered. It is only then that the barn door is closed on the animal who is actually a non-human life form.

Not only is psychopathic behaviour tolerated, it is also positively encouraged. The sociopathic characteristics of narcissistic self-promotion, manipulative cunning, superficial charm, absence of guilt or remorse, and ruthless pursuit of an objective are stylised as the virtues of popularity, leadership ability, politeness, fortitude, and personal drive. The perfect CEO, President, or Bishop. And there are just so many of them, as Saffy realises:

“Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good… She’d seen it so many times—how they squirmed through the cracks in a system that favored them. How, even after they’d committed the most violent crimes, they felt entitled to their freedom,”

Studies have shown that these are the traits of just the kind of people who disproportionately find their way to positions of authority in business, government and academia. From these positions they are able to be as injurious or even murderous as their fellows without falling foul of legal constraints. They inflict suffering but do not suffer unless their ability to inflict suffering is impeded. The psychopath knows this instinctively, knows he is of a different, superior species, and says so. Shouldn’t we take him at his word?

So, in this sense at least, it is the tolerant society that harbours the mutant psychopath, or at least allows him or her (but mostly him) to exist and flourish in the name of the good. But theologically speaking, the psychopath in himself seems to me decisive evidence that Augustine is wrong. “Evil isn’t something you can pinpoint or hold, cradle or banish,” thinks Saffy. This much of Augustine is certainly true. Nevertheless Saffy also knows through her own experience that “Evil hides, sly and invisible, in the corners of everything else.”

That is, Saffy realises that evil is a pure immaterial substance distilled and concentrated in the psychopathic personality. This is a non-personality which is inherently and permanently destructive. Ansel is aware of his own disorder when he says to himself, “You only moved on the force of what you knew yourself to be.”

This non-personality is certainly not in any sense good. Any good following in the psychopath’s wake is incidental, and probably accidental as well - like evil sometimes inadvertently results from the actions of normals. Psychopaths like Ansel don’t make bad choices; they have no choices, only compulsions, which they act on aggressively to achieve position, reputation, desires, and a general recognition in the world.

Psychopaths themselves know their condition is not only profoundly aberrant but also incorrigible. As Ansel muses about himself, “You were impossible. Beyond help. You would never be more than your own creature self.” They know, as Ansel also says, that they are already dead and that this gives them inhuman and inhumane power. There is no final double jeopardy. Death cannot come twice. They are effectively released, therefore, from all morality. Psychopaths, therefore, really should have to prove their innocence when suspected of anything. Guilty until proven innocent.

The hope we all share about psychopaths is that they reveal themselves. Saffy is confident that “you could not hide your real self forever, no matter how normal you looked; the truth would come out eventually.” But as Saffy also thinks, correctly, “It was an ambitious concept, justice.” So Saffy isn’t interested in justice. She wants to do good.

The way Saffy puts it is “She wants to be good, whatever that meant.” But really what that means is the attainment and exercise of power. She always has wanted power. It’s why she became a cop. She wants what the psychopath has in excess. Thus do psychopaths create other psychopaths, an unusual but effective method of quasi-sexual reproduction combining the zygotes of revenge and envy to produce monsters.

Thus those attempting to combat evil through force become implicated in evil: “Saffy had not saved anyone.” In fact she precipitated a death. She failed. But not because she might have turned “Ansel into exactly the monster she needed him to be.” Rather, she had become the monster in his image.

It is his victim’s sister who gives the final word on Ansel: “Hazel believes that a person can be evil, and nothing more. There are millions of men out there who want to hurt women—people seem to think that Ansel Packer is extraordinary, because he actually did.” But this condemnation is followed immediately by Ansel’s psychotic rationalisation:

“You do not feel the same love that everyone else does. Yours is muted, damp, not bursting or breaking. But there is a place for you, in the category of personhood. There has to be. Humanity can discard you, but they cannot deny it.”

I deny it insistently.

Postscript 06/02/22. Just one of the many examples of the psychotic phenomenon: https://apple.news/AYznxAZDoSPORM61gn...

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